"Krone" commentary

State Secretary as “Mini Musk”

Taking stock for the "Krone": Head of Economics Georg Wailand

(Bild: Krone KREATIV)

State secretaries are not generally considered to be the most spectacular appointments. Former Chancellor Kreisky said at the time, when he was angry with "his" State Secretary Veselsky: "State Secretaries are assistants to the respective Minister." Well, things are likely to be different for Sepp Schellhorn in the new government: as an eloquent practitioner, he is supposed to streamline the bureaucracy. A bureaucracy that has proliferated over decades and is "hitting" the provinces and municipalities in particular.

As an innkeeper and hotelier, he has been confronted with precisely these problems and knows where the snags are.
As "Mini Musk", he is to take an Austrian approach to cutting red tape. It will be exciting to see how he tackles this task: people have been complaining about bureaucratic excesses for ages (and usually rightly so), but changes and improvements often get caught up in the thicket of legal regulations.

There has already been the "Austrian Convention", which was pushed by the then President of the Court of Audit, Fiedler. In fact, very concrete reform proposals were made on many points.
However, these reforms did not take place. The power of the mayors and provincial governors was too great.

This is reminiscent of a comment made at the funeral of a well-known architect: "And once we even almost let him build something."